Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailableLiminaire: Performance Contexts and Cultural Dynamics of the Saxophone in Australia, 1853–1938( 2023-06)This project explores the largely untold first eighty-five years of the saxophone in Australia. For a unique Australian context it examines, and ultimately challenges, the long- and widely-held view that the instrument was solely a product and expression of popular or ‘lowbrow’ musical culture; instead, it argues that the saxophone’s character in Australia between 1853 and 1938 was enduringly cosmopolitan, stylistically diverse across the cultural strata, and a mirror to evolving notions of Australian identity. A five-chapter dissertation, weighted at 80%, details the saxophone’s Australian efflorescence in a variety of performance contexts from the goldrush to the cusp of the Second World War. A number of landmark performers and performances are established, including the headline discovery that the instrument debuted in Australia before being first heard in the United States. Drawing on categories established by John Whiteoak, this study incorporates ‘approved’ musical settings that were seen to reinforce social cohesion, such as the concert stage and the bandstand, and ‘anonymous’ settings, including the commercially-oriented domains of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and jazz. Notions of liminality are employed to explain and contextualise the saxophone’s marginal, and yet still remarkably potent, place in musical and wider cultural and social life over this time. This argument is built on research into a wide range of primary sources, including historical newspaper and journal articles, sheet music, sound recordings, silent and sound film, and interviews with notable Australian musicians. An accompanying audio-visual folio, weighted at 20%, features 33 minutes of new recordings for saxophone ensemble, saxophone and piano, and concert band in march and art music transcription forms.
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ItemMelodic Excursions: The Brazilian cavaquinho’s global journey( 2021)This research project explores the long and diverse history of the cavaquinho through a combination of practical performance and archival research. This four-string soprano guitar is a ubiquitous instrument in several musical cultures and its origins may be traced to Portugal where very similar instruments have been in use since the seventeenth century. The cavaquinho, and closely related instruments, spread across the globe along routes of migration and this study will focus on four key traditions, those of Brazil, Portugal, Indonesia, and Hawaii. These historical links will be investigated through recorded performances played on the modern Brazilian cavaquinho, together with written analysis of historical and performance contexts. A diverse portfolio of recordings showcases performance practices and repertoires from the nineteenth century, through to the flourishing tradition of the twentieth century and new and emerging contemporary genres. The Brazilian cavaquinho is the instrument through which I engage with these contrasting repertoires, drawing on the richness of the instrument’s technique and performance style. The recordings are not presented as historical recreations, but as extensions of the distinct evolving traditions through the application of contemporary practices. Collaborations with renowned international practitioners feature on many of the recordings, and the creative element of this thesis extends to original arrangements and compositions. Through a combination of performance recordings, research, analysis and original arrangements and compositions, this project demonstrates how the cavaquinho is the perfect vehicle to illuminate and reinvigorate historically linked traditions and styles.
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ItemSpanish music and its representations in London (1878-1930): from the exotic to the modern( 2013)This thesis argues that the landscape of Spanish music in London evolved between 1878 and 1930 from Romantic exotic constructions to a recognition and appreciation of Spanish musical nationalism, which reflected some of the concerns of post-war musical modernism in a newly cosmopolitan context. This transformation will be traced through the study of specific protagonists and events that contributed to the English reception of Spanish music during this period. While the development of Spanish nationalist music and its important intersections with French music have been studied in numerous texts, little has been written on the English engagement with Spanish music. A key event in defining musical and theatrical Spain in the latter part of the nineteenth century came from France in the guise of George Bizet's Carmen (1875, London 1878). The opera, and its many parodies and theatrical re-workings in London, provides a foundation for discussions of Spanishness in late nineteenth-century England, and influenced the reception of Pablo Sarasate and Isaac Albéniz. In the Edwardian era, closer ties between England and Spain, increased travel possibilities and specialist writers rekindled enthusiasm for Spanish music. The anti- German currents of the pre-war years and the influence of French writers and musicians set the scene for the further English appreciation of Spanish music in the aftermath of the death of Enrique Granados in 1916. The English success of the Ballets Russes production of The Three-Cornered Hat (1919), with music by Manuel de Falla, marked the broader acceptance of Spanish musical nationalism. With the critical recognition of Falla's neoclassical works of the 1920s Spanish music achieved further acknowledgement in England from cosmopolitan critics. At the same time the Spanish guitar was seen to embody many aspects of post-war Spanish music, and through the concerts of Andrés Segovia established itself in a new guise in London. By 1930, the recognition and popularity of Spanish music indicated the extent to which it had integrated and evolved beyond the Romantic stereotypes prevalent half a century earlier.
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ItemThe dodo was really a phoenix: the renaissance and revival of the recorder in England 1879-1941( 2005)This study provides a critical analysis of the modern renaissance and popularization of the recorder in England, examining the phenomena and placing them within their broader musical and cultural contexts. It explores the roles of the principal protagonists and institutions, arguing that a confluence of different agendas—musical, educational and social—within an environment of changing conditions, was crucial to the successful revival of an instrument, which in Victorian England had no living tradition at all. There was a clear relationship between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century scholarship on the recorder and the desire to learn more about England’s ‘golden age’ of music during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even before the 1870s, scholars represented the recorder as an obsolete instrument. By the 1890s and particularly from 1900, there were a few people playing the instrument in public, most notably Canon Galpin and Arnold Dolmetsch. Unquestionably, Dolmetsch’s work with the recorder between 1900 and the late 1920s was crucial to the subsequent mass revival. Changes in educational ideas and doctrine between the World Wars led to children’s music classes including active instrumental music making, in part to stimulate a sense of cultural identity. From 1926 the bamboo pipe gradually became the melodic instrument most commonly used in English schools, until Edgar Hunt, inspired by Arnold Dolmetsch’s Haslemere concerts, conceived of a popular recorder revival. Hunt began to import inexpensive German recorders, and to research and publish pre-Classical recorder music. From 1935 the recorder began to usurp the place of the bamboo pipe in English elementary schools. Concurrently, musical and educational authorities were encouraging domestic music making, for social and musically nationalistic reasons, often linking it with Elizabethan music making. The idea that a strong musical knowledge across all demographics could enable the nation to become ‘a land with music’ once more was invoked in many of the activities undertaken between the Wars. The work of The Society of Recorder Players, established in 1937, was significant and had long-term consequences for the success of the popular revival, as well as for the relative status of the recorder. At the same time, classes established by Edgar Hunt at Trinity College of Music as well as new compositions for the recorder helped to legitimize the instrument. This thesis addresses a number of gaps in previous research, by exploring thoroughly the history of the recorder in England between 1879 and 1941, utilizing extensive primary source materials—many hitherto overlooked—; by examining linkages between the recorder’s increasing usage and the various strands of the English musical renaissance; and by determining why the recorder was so highly popular when other instruments—notably the bamboo pipe—appeared to have similar attributes.
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ItemMusic in state-supported education in New South Wales and Victoria, 1848-1920( 1978)This investigation considers the development of class music teaching in New South Wales and Victoria during the first seventy-two years of state-supported primary education. Looking firstly at the English background to this study, the principal music teaching methods (which resulted from the English choral singing movement of the mid-nineteenth century) as well as the subsequent development of music teaching in English elementary schools are discussed. The promotion of school music is then considered on a broadly chronological basis in each state and a number of themes are seen to emerge in relation to developments in school music policy and practice during the period. The major themes include such issues as whether music should be part of the ordinary school curriculum or an extra-curricular subject, whether musical instruction should be given by generalist or specialist teachers, and which method should be employed for teaching children to read music. Other major themes include the controversy between protagonists of the respective staff and tonic sol-fa notations, the issue of teacher training in music for ordinary class teachers, and the relationship of curriculum content to the aims and objectives of school music. In addition comparisons are made, and parallels drawn, between developments in both states and also between the respective states and school music in England. The final chapter demonstrates the relevance of many of the historical themes for music education today. There is a drawing together of the main themes which enables certain trends in school music policy and practice as well as certain problems and deficiencies which emerged during the period 1848-1920 to be clearly identified. These are then considered in relation to the contemporary school music scene. The findings are that certain aspects at present represent a continuation of former policies and practices while other aspects represent a departure from the traditions of the past. For example, the recent introduction of the "new" Kodaly method represents a continuation of the movable doh solmisation system which has in fact been a traditional feature of school music teaching in New South Wales since the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the phasing-out of prescribed music curricula in both states in favour of school-based curriculum planning represents an obvious departure from tradition. In addition there are certain problems and deficiencies in primary music education at present which have either persisted since 1920 or have re-emerged from the past. For example, the low priority afforded to music in the primary curriculum and the lack of musical competence among generalist teachers have become almost traditional features of primary education in both states. There is also a re-emergence of the problem of inadequate musical training for primary teachers in many pre-service teacher training courses at present. The thesis concludes by citing a recurring problem from the past, namely the lack of co-ordination between various aspects of school music policy, as the most serious problem to be overcome if primary school children are to receive effective and worthwhile music education in the future.